Xoom 2 hitting Europe for the holidays

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It looks like Motorola is a fan of the old adage If at first you don’t succeed… The original Xoom was hotly anticipated, voted the Best of Show at CES 2011, and was the vanguard of growing buzz about the considerable potential of Android tablets.

… but then it launched. It arrived without a WiFi-only option, carried an $800 off-contract price tag, and lacked working LTE or SD card support until a month ago. In a classic chicken or egg scenario, developers were then slow to optimize Android apps for tablets, and the Xoom didn’t even make a dent in the iPad’s dominance of the tablet market. The slate grew to epitomize Android’s miserable start in the quest to dethrone the iPad.

Now Motorola is set to launch a sequel. Whether this is a brilliant idea or an inane one may depend on your point of view. On the one hand, it could be wise to correct the missteps that were made the first time around. On the other, it may have been smart to retire the name altogether and introduce a completely different tablet.

Either way, the Xoom 2 is what we will be getting, and Carphone Warehouse has the (above) flyer to prove it. The tablet is listed at €399.90, which comes out to about $547. It’s listed as having an 8.2 inch display, and is running Android 3.2 (not Ice Cream Sandwich at launch apparently). Curiously, it’s listed as being WiFi only, but with “tethering capability.” How exactly is a WiFi only model going to tether? I’m guessing they’re suggesting that you can tether your smartphone to it, because otherwise that makes no sense.

This 8.2 inch model won’t likely be the only Xoom 2 that we see. Previous leaks have told us of a 10.1 inch model that will have LTE (out of the box this time). There is no US launch info for either tablet, but as the European flyer is heavily pushing the “get something special this Christmas,” I’d expect to see this one in the states before the holidays as well.